How advertisers target you on Facebook

FILE PHOTO: Silhouettes of mobile users are seen next to a screen projection of Facebook logo in this picture illustration taken March 28, 2018. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File photo

How Facebook (FB) makes money can confuse anybody. Just ask Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who during Tuesday’s Senate interrogation of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg asked the 33-year-old how the social network stayed in business.

But it’s how those ads come together that’s interesting, and everybody on Facebook should understand how the company can use its deep knowledge of our interests to attract advertisers anxious to aim their pitches at customers with the greatest potential returns.

Fortunately, Facebook’s ad machinery isn’t a secret; anybody who maintains a public page, myself included, can use the same basic tools to target ads at people by telling Facebook what kind of interests and demographics they want to attract — or exclude.

Address for success

Facebook ads work the other way. You tell the social network what kind of people should see your ad, and Facebook obliges as best as it can.

Companies and individual with Facebook pages can use the company’s vast array of user information to target specific groups for their ads.

It starts with a request to select the target audience’s gender (your only choices are male or female) and age range (you can set that as low as 13, Facebook’s minimum age). Then you choose a location.

The word “minority,” for instance, yields suggestions like “Lesser Poland,” “Los Angeles Dodgers minor league players” and “Nucleic acid double helix.” You’re more likely to be surprised by interests you can’t target — for instance, HBO’s comedy “Silicon Valley” is in Facebook’s database, but not Showtime’s drama “Billions.”

An example of how companies can set up ads to target specific Facebook users.

Words and phrases tied to various sorts of bigotry also appear off-limits, to judge from experimentation that hopefully doesn’t have Facebook thinking I’m a Nazi. That’s a change from what Pro Publica found last year, whenits reporters could buy ads with anti-Semitic terms

Custom audiences

The other way to target people by Facebook requires first finding them outside the social network. ItsCustom Audiences feature lets you upload a customer list and have Facebook show your ad to those people — if your information matches what it knows about them.

The easiest way to do this is tocreate and upload a simple spreadsheet with people’s email addresses, phone numbers, names, birthdays and other details. You don’t, however, need their street addresses — just city, state and Zip code.

I tested this with my own info and that of three Yahoo Finance colleagues — with their permission, sinceFacebook’s rules require that upfront. (The minimum size for a Custom Audience upload is100; I filled out the rest with made-up entries.)

Facebook allows advertisers to target specific users, but only if they have the users’ permission.

Roughly a half hour later, Facebook had matched my database with Facebook accounts — but it didn’t tell me which ones. It then offered to expand this list’s reach by creating a“lookalike audience” of people who match the Facebook-determined traits of my custom audience.

You can also generate a Custom Audience by adding a“Facebook Pixel” to your site to track and record what visitors do there.

I didn’t actually purchase this ad after going to all this trouble, but I have bought Facebook ads before — in thespring andfall of last year, the site offered me a credit to try boosting a post on my page. The results weren’t all that impressive.

But as an advertiser, much of this is mysterious too. I can’t tell how Facebook decides which users will be interested in a particular topic. And while I may want to avoid looking like a practitioner of surveillance capitalism, I couldn’t tell Facebook to consider only data based on people’s activity on Facebook itself.